RRND Email Full Text (Scheduled)


  • The Ghost in the State

    Source: Liberalism.org
    by Michael C Munger

    “British philosopher Gilbert Ryle famously mocked Descartes’s notion of mind/body dualism, dubbing it ‘the ghost in the machine.’ The mind is in the body, but it’s not of the body. The mind controls the body, independently, ‘everywhere yet nowhere.’ There is a related problem in identifying a ‘will’ in the state: is the state the sort of thing that can have an active, separate will? Or is the will of the state simply the aggregate of individual goals, actions, and votes? The branch of political theory I inhabit, public choice, holds that ghosts don’t exist, because a foundational assumption is methodological individualism. But many people have argued for a romantic, collectivist approach.” (07/13/26)

    https://www.liberalism.org/p/the-ghost-in-the-state

  • The Problem Isn’t Old Public Officials

    Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
    by Jacob G Hornberger

    “With the death of 71-year-old U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham and the hospitalization of 84-year-old U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell, not to mention the 80-year-old President Trump, some commentators are questioning whether it’s a good thing that the federal government has so many senior citizens working in it. … The problem America faces, however, is not the old age of its federal officials but rather the dysfunctional systems that 20th-century and 21st-century Americans have grafted onto the federal government. Those systems have brought failure, death, and destruction of liberty and privacy. The result would be no different if the federal government were being run by people with an average age of 45.” (07/13/26)

    https://www.fff.org/2026/07/13/the-problem-isnt-old-public-officials/

  • Hiding Racism and Nativism Behind “Heritage American”

    Source: Exiled Policy
    by Jason Pye

    “Ayn Rand captured the moral bankruptcy of racism better than almost anyone when she wrote that it is ‘the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.’ She understood that racism reduces human beings to representatives of a group, assigning moral, social, and political significance to ancestry rather than treating people as individuals. That’s why phrases like ‘heritage American’ bother me. The phrase is deliberately vague. … Every American has a heritage. The descendants of enslaved people have one. The descendants of Ellis Island immigrants have one. The children of Vietnamese refugees have one. Native Americans certainly have one. Heritage isn’t the distinguishing feature. The phrase only makes sense if ‘heritage’ refers to a particular ancestry that some people believe is more authentically American than others.” (07/13/26)

    https://exiledpolicy.substack.com/p/hiding-racism-and-nativism-behind

  • While the Political Circus Distracts Us, Flock Builds the Digital Police State

    Source: Rutherford Institute
    by John & Nisha Whitehead

    “The government is watching. It watches where you go, whom you meet, where you worship, what medical offices you visit, what political rallies you attend, what protests you join, what books you read, what websites you visit and what causes you support. It watches through your phone, your car, your doorbell, your appliances, your purchases, your social media accounts and the cameras positioned along the roads you travel every day. This is how freedom dies in the digital police state: not always through dramatic declarations of martial law or soldiers stationed on every street corner, but through the gradual construction of a technological dragnet—an electronic concentration camp—so pervasive that privacy becomes impossible and anonymity becomes suspicious.” (07/13/26)

    https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/while_the_political_circus_distracts_us_flock_builds_the_digital_police_state

  • Microlooters and Macrolooters

    Source: Underthrow
    by Max Borders

    “Jennifer Baker, PhD, receives about $100,000 per year in monetary compensation, plus an additional ~$30,000 in benefits. Because she works at a state university—The University of Charleston—supported by both state and federal taxpayers, she is the direct beneficiary of what we might call macrolooting. Her salary depends, at least in part, on compulsory taxation, placing her in the comfortable position of evaluating the ethics of breaching paywalls while leaving the coercive institutions that fund her livelihood unexamined. … ‘let’s turn now to the subject of ‘microlooting.’ Here, Baker opens a recent Psychology Today post. ‘If you deliberately scan one fewer lemon than you are taking at the self-checkout at Whole Foods, you might be ‘microlooting.'” (07/13/26)

    https://underthrow.substack.com/p/microlooters-and-macrolooters

  • Graham Platner and the Rationalization of Everything

    Source: American Greatness
    by Stephen Soukup

    “Regular readers may note that I am rather deeply haunted by a paragraph written almost exactly a decade ago by the late, great Angelo Codevilla. It was, perhaps, his most important warning to us, and it remains one of the few political predictions ever made that keeps me awake at night. In the waning days of the 2016 campaign, after watching the way the entire ruling class had mobilized to deride Donald Trump and to ensure his defeat, Codevilla penned an essay titled After the Republic, in which he forewarned: We have stepped over the threshold of a revolution. It is difficult to imagine how we might step back, and futile to speculate where it will end. Our ruling class’s malfeasance, combined with insult, brought it about. Donald Trump did not cause it and is by no means its ultimate manifestation.” (07/13/26)

    https://amgreatness.com/2026/07/13/graham-platner-and-the-rationalization-of-everything/

  • Trump’s Health Is … Complicated

    Source: Persuasion
    by Sam Kahn

    “He isn’t as decrepit as Democrats pretend. But Republicans are slowly imagining a post-Trump world.” (07/13/26)

    https://www.persuasion.community/p/trump-is-old-but-senile-probably

  • Congressional Ratification of President Trump’s Corporatism

    Source: Ron Paul Liberty Report
    by Ron Paul

    “Despite regularly denouncing the rising socialist menace, President Trump has been pursuing a policy arguably just as, if not more, dangerous to liberty and prosperity as anything proposed by Zohran Mamdani or Bernie Sanders: using government funds to purchase partial ownership of private companies. The Trump administration has obtained ownership interests of approximately 27 billion dollars in 30 companies since January of 2025. While President Trump and his defenders claim making these ‘investments’ will benefit the American people, the truth is this policy will harm most Americans.” (07/13/26)

    http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com/archives/congressional-ratification-of-president-trumps-corporatism

  • Lindsey Graham’s Legacy? It’s About One Thing Only, and It Isn’t Good

    Source: The New Republic
    by Michael Tomasky

    “He alone had the moral authority within the Republican Party to try to stop Donald Trump, especially after January 6. He chose not to. That’s what we must remember today.” (07/13/26)

    https://newrepublic.com/article/212980/lindsey-graham-legacy-trump-enabler

  • DEI“A” Directive Denied

    Source: Common Sense
    by Paul Jacob

    “Daymon Johnson has been fighting to speak freely. A professor at Bakersfield College, a community college in California, Johnson has for years been bucking a mandate that he parrot the state’s ‘DEI’ and ‘anti-racist’ ideology — well, DEIA now: ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ — lest he face disciplinary action or receive the boot. Community colleges, remember, are creations of the state, and Professor Johnson was being forced, by state directive, to mouth specific bureaucratic verbiage as if he were a mere functionary under a central planning board. … this imperfect ruling paves the way for further vindications.” (07/13/26)

    https://thisiscommonsense.org/2026/07/13/deia-directive-denied/

  • The Democratic Socialists Aren’t Fringe Anymore

    Source: Town Hall
    by Jay Rogers

    “I spend my days reading growth curves. A pension fund’s unfunded liability, a private equity fund’s internal rate of return, a hedge fund’s drawdown. You learn to read a line on a chart the way a doctor reads one on a different kind of monitor. Most political organizations produce a flat line for decades, a small bump around an election, then flat again. The Democratic Socialists of America just produced a line that would get flagged in any diligence memo I’ve written in 30 years. An organization with 6,000 members in 2015 crossed 100,000 in February 2026, and by this July had passed the old high-water mark for American socialism: the roughly 113,000 members the Socialist Party of America claimed at its 1912 peak under Eugene Debs. DSA now calls itself, correctly, the largest socialist organization in American history.” (07/13/26)

    https://townhall.com/columnists/jay-rogers/2026/07/13/the-democratic-socialists-arent-fringe-anymore-n2679278

  • A Doctor in the Chemist’s

    Source: Adam Smith Institute
    by Madsen Pirie

    “There is a small alcove at the back of most chemist shops these days, usually curtained off, where a pharmacist jabs your arm with a flu vaccine or a Covid booster while you sit with your sleeve rolled up. It is, in its modest way, one of the great quiet successes of British healthcare over the last decade. Nobody voted for it, nobody legislated it into being with a grand ten-year plan, and yet it works. It exists because Boots and Superdrug and the local independents worked out that people would pay a small sum for convenience, speed, and the absence of a three-week wait. I propose that we should extend this principle, and put a doctor in there as well.” (07/13/26)

    https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/a-doctor-in-the-chemists

  • It’s Been Ten Years; Time To Admit Bernie Sanders Was Wrong

    Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
    by Caitlin Johnstone

    “Everyone’s talking about how progressive Democrat Graham Platner has been forced to drop out of his Senate race following allegations of sexual assault. Personally I never paid attention to Platner’s campaign, because I long ago stopped taking Democrats seriously. The first clue that Platner was a shitty person wasn’t his military service or his Blackwater stint or his tattoo or the sexual assault stuff, it was that he ran for high office in the US government under one of America’s two mainstream parties. That’s damning in and of itself. I said this on Twitter today and some DSA guy told me the best way to make changes in US politics is to work within the Democratic Party to elect left-wing candidates and advance progressive agendas.” (07/10/26)

    https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2026/07/10/its-been-ten-years-its-time-to-admit-bernie-sanders-was-wrong/